I was asked to share my thoughts on today’s Israeli elections. You can see who I voted for by scrolling down to the “Cool Stuff” section in the right-hand column of the blog and clicking the Hebrew-language banner (there’s only one), which takes you to the party’s English-language website.

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This Tuesday, we’ll be holding elections here in Israel. If the polls conducted so far are anything to judge by, it seems that Israelis have made a rather pronounced shift towards the right side of the political spectrum, and it’s probably safe to speculate that this is a direct consequence of the conflict.

One of the more troubling aspects of the race is the sharp rise of the far-right wing Yisrael Beitenu, or, “Israel is Our Home”, party, led by Avigdor Lieberman. Yisrael Beitenu is currently predicted to receive the third largest number of seats. Much has been said about the party’s controversial campaign slogan, which roughly translates to, “No loyalty, no citizenship”. Their campaign platform bluntly questions the loyalty of Israeli Arabs, and frankly, there’s a part of me that wonders about the party’s definition of loyalty, and whether I, as one whose opinions don’t really mesh with the party platform, would be considered disloyal as well, according to their definition.

In Israel, there is often the feeling that we are not necessarily voting for the party that we support, but rather the party that we dislike the least. This election is no different, as many of my friends are planning to vote for Kadima in an attempt to keep the Likud from winning. They don’t even necessarily like Kadima, but their distrust of Benyamin Netanyahu and the Likud party is so great that they’re willing to forgo voting for a party with which they might actually identify in order to keep Netanyahu from becoming the next prime minister. There’s even a Facebook group called “Just not Bibi”, which has more than 4,000 members.

And of course, many Israelis are disillusioned, completely frustrated by the politicians in the large parties, and ready to show their disappointment at the polls by voting for smaller parties. It’s been years since I voted for one of the bigger parties, and this year won’t be any different. I can’t bring myself to vote tactically, and tend to go with my gut instincts. I don’t feel that any of the large parties truly represent me, so the best I can do is to vote for a party with which I most identify, and hope that they cross the minimum threshold. Some would say that I’m wasting my vote, but I don’t see it that way. Sure, some of the small parties shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but there are others that promote a platform that desperately requires an increased awareness in our society.

I will finish this by saying that it would never occur to me not to vote, even when I feel the pickings are slim. I think of the societies where people are not given this opportunity, or the countries where people who show support for anyone other than the ruling party are harshly mistreated. At least here, I, along with all Israeli citizens, both Arabs and Jews, am allowed to vote for whoever I wish, a privilege I daresay that many others in this region do not have.

What follows below is the text for my final daily diary entry for the BBC World Service radio show “The World Today“. The audio link for this show can be found here, and includes a response from one of my counterparts in Gaza, Mr. Omar Sha’ban, an economist and father who lives in central Gaza.

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This is Liza Rosenberg, keeping an audio diary for the World Today. When I tell Israelis that I’ve been keeping this daily diary for a BBC World Service radio show, I’m often met with a pleading response to “explain that Israel had to do this. Explain to everyone how we didn’t have a choice.” While I would be lying if I didn’t say that there are definitely some Israelis who are celebrating what’s been happening in Gaza, most of the people who I’ve spoken to do not feel that way, feeling instead that Israel did not have a choice.

As we entered this conflict, many Israelis were genuinely puzzled by the fact that no one else seemed to understand why we felt this way. Part of me has felt this way also, which I imagine you may have gathered from the diary entries I’ve shared with you since early last week. I’ve been having these terrible feelings of frustration as this conflict has dragged on, being tugged back and forth by events that have happened – Hamas’ cynical use of its civilian population, questioning Israel’s ethics when it fired on a school. I’ve had feelings of sadness as I dealt with a loss of innocence of sorts, as my four year-old son learned that there are bad people who shoot rockets at schools, and his belief that if I were to buy him a sword, he would be able to defeat the bad guys.

There have been times that I felt were incredibly important, times when I had an opportunity to shape my son’s thoughts and wanted so badly to ensure that he understood. When he told me that his teacher explained that there are good Arabs and bad Arabs, I responded by reminding him that there are good people and bad people, and that it doesn’t matter where they’re from or if they’re somehow different from us. I tell him that in Gaza, there are little boys just like him, little girls, mommies and daddies, that they are good people, and that they are probably very scared right now.

As this will probably be my last daily diary entry, I was asked by my editors if I would be willing to conduct a joint interview with my counterparts in Gaza. I thought about it, but felt that I couldn’t go through with it. What could I possibly say that wouldn’t sound hollow and completely ridiculous in light of the fact that my country is destroying his? To say sorry would be so hopelessly inadequate in this situation, I think. I would feel ashamed, embarrassed, helpless. And they might take their anger out on me, which, though misplaced, would be understandable. Or perhaps they would be gracious, and that would be even more unbearable, because I would feel so horribly, horribly guilty. After all, as I sit here in Israel with all of these thoughts, all of these worries about what my son is understanding, these gentlemen are worrying about whether their families will survive another night in Gaza. I’m not personally responsible for anything that’s been happening down there, and I believe Hamas has to realize that there will be consequences to its actions. I want more than anything for there to be peace and quiet for my fellow Israelis in the south. Ideally, I want the same thing for the Palestinians in Gaza as well. As I formulate my words, news networks are reporting that Hamas has agreed to a one-year, renewable ceasefire, if Israel is prepared to meet certain conditions. And I wonder how we’ll ever find our way out of this mess that we Israelis and Palestinians have managed to create.

This is Liza Rosenberg, keeping an audio diary for the World Today. On Friday morning, I had the pleasure of participating in the birthday celebration for one of my dearest friends. There were six of us, all from similar backgrounds and all of us mothers of young children. The situation down south is never far from anyone’s mind these days, and as we sat in the cozy, popular café near the city of Modiin, passing plates of food back and forth and drinking copious amounts of coffee, conversation drifted towards our children and how they’ve been connecting with what’s happening.

In schools throughout Israel, the situation is being explained at age-appropriate levels. In the pre-school that my friend’s daughter attends, the children were asked draw pictures to send to the soldiers serving in Gaza, while the primary school students were told that the army is fighting because terrorists have been firing rockets into Israel. I asked my own son whether his teacher had spoken about it. “She told us that there are good Arabs and bad Arabs,” he said. “The bad ones are shooting rockets at schools, and some families are hosting the kids from those schools so they’ll be safe. I want us to host kids too,” he added.

Today is Sunday, and Israeli evening news reports are showing images of a school and a zoo in Gaza that were wired with explosives – all the classrooms, the grounds, the cages where animals were being kept… The top story was about a rocket that slammed into a playground adjacent to an empty preschool in the city of Ashdod, causing a great deal of damage to the preschool.

When I was in school, we had fire drills. Today, Israeli children are taught what to do in the event of a rocket attack. My friends with older children are worried about them nearing army age. I’m teaching my son about stranger danger while his teacher explains that bad people are firing rockets at schools. As my friends and I finished our coffee, we talked about shielding our children from harm. The irony wasn’t lost on me as I thought of the Hamas fighters who do the opposite, fighters who use children to shield themselves from harm.

***Update***

This audio diary entry can be heard via the “Liza Rosenberg” link on this page. Other entries can be found here.

“Who’s that,” asked the Little One, as we sat in front of the television watching a story about the Kadima party on the evening news. “The Prime Minister,” I responded.

“I want him to die,” said the Little One, rather innocently.

The husband and I exchanged glances over our child’s head. The Little One’s only concrete knowledge of prime ministers revolves around the lessons in preschool about Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination he learned about last month during the annual memorial. He’s also reached a stage where he’s curious about the concept of death and dying, and I can only surmise that a four year-old’s comprehension of a prime minister’s murder and his limited understanding of death resulted in that rather out-of-the-blue comment.

“That’s not a nice thing to say about someone, sweetie. We don’t want him to die. We just want him to go to jail,” I explained, making the husband smile.

“Okay, Mommy.” He thought for a moment. “Is he bad?” the Little One queried. “Yes, sweetie. I believe he is. He’s in trouble with the law, and the police are investigating.”

“What about him? Is he bad too?” I glanced at the television screen and saw that Tzachi Hanegbi was speaking. “Yes, sweetie. He’s in trouble too,” I responded.

“And him?” the Little One asked. Now we were watching Roni Bar-On. “Yes,” I sighed. “He’s also in trouble with the law.”

Just another day in the Israeli political arena. With politicians like these, is it any wonder that we can’t be bothered to summon up the energy to get excited about the upcoming elections?

Belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness; “the crude weapons and rude agricultural implements of early man”; “primitive movies of the 1890s”; “primitive living conditions in the Appalachian mountains”

Devoid of any qualifications or disguise or adornment; “the blunt truth”; “the crude facts”; “facing the stark reality of the deadline” [syn: blunt]

Belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness; “the crude weapons and rude agricultural implements of early man”; “primitive movies of the 1890s”; “primitive living conditions in the Appalachian mountains” [syn: crude]

Little evolved from or characteristic of an earlier ancestral type; “archaic forms of life”; “primitive mammals”; “the okapi is a short-necked primitive cousin of the giraffe” [syn: archaic]

Used of preliterate or tribal or nonindustrial societies; “primitive societies”

Of or created by one without formal training; simple or naive in style; “primitive art such as that by Grandma Moses is often colorful and striking”

And yet, the world at large falls into the same trap time and time again. Hamas and other local terror groups fire rockets into Israel, and world leaders call for Israel to exercise restraint. More and more rockets are fired; damage is heavy and children are traumatized, but because the rockets are “crude” and “primitive”, they apparently don’t count. How many rockets must be fired before we are allowed to respond? And as long as we’re discussing this issue, just so that we’ll have a better idea, what exactly would be an appropriate response to the thousands of rockets that have been fired into our southern cities and towns during the past eight years, not to mention the occasional cross-border sniper attacks, hmmm? We acquiesce to global pressure and continue to “show restraint”, though not without the Prime Minister or one of his henchmen making some silly comment that “we will find the perpetrators of these attacks”, or that “no terrorist will be safe”, or “we reserve the right to respond to these attacks on our citizens, and will do so when the time is right” (which of course hasn’t really happened, given that Knesset members all seem far too busy squabbling over the diversion of funds to protect the inhabitants of Sderot without actually taking any action on the matter).

When the situation escalates to the point of being intolerable (though clearly, the definition of intolerable seems to differ whether one is based in Sderot or in the Knesset), Israel finally takes action. EU and UN personnel are roused out of the long slumber they were clearly enjoying while rockets rained down and Israel did nothing, and suddenly, 8000 rockets later, the world is incensed that Israel has the audacity to retaliate. With sad predictability, we are reviled and demonized for daring to try to protect ourselves, and Hamas scores extra credit points for managing to chip away at the remaining shreds of support among left-leaning Israelis who can no longer be bothered to summon up the energy to care. It’s just too difficult to feel sympathy for the other side’s losses anymore when the world can’t seem to summon up the energy to care about us when we sit back and allow ourselves to be relentlessly pounded.

Despite the dearth of political postings lately, anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while probably has at least an inkling as to my political leanings. I was in favor of the Disengagement (though I believe that the way the government has treated the evacuees since then is positively shameful), and in spite of the current shaky state of affairs, I still believe that negotiating a two-state solution is the way to go, even though it’s not a realistic option at the moment. And, when I say that serious negotiations are not realistic, I lay the blame for this on both sides. Palestinian leadership is too fragmented to speak on behalf of all Palestinians in the Territories, and with Hamas currently running the show in Gaza and showering Southern Israel with missiles and rockets, any agreement made at this stage would not be worth the paper it’s written on. That being said, the Israeli government has hardly shown its commitment to the process either, often turning a blind eye to illegal settlement outposts and attempts to change the status quo in various parts of Jerusalem, interpreting agreements to suit their own needs and feigning surprise when the world complains. And, before anyone says anything, there can be no moral equivalence between the relentless, deadly rocket attacks on Sderot and the Western Negev, and the government’s construction plans, but one can hardly blame the powers that be for not taking our pledges and oaths seriously when we can’t even be bothered to make more than half-hearted attempts at fulfilling them ourselves.

Of course, the Olmert government is hardly different from its predecessors in that respect, given the settlement activity that has continued virtually unabated over the years, no matter which government happened to be leading the country at the time. The policy of turning a blind eye to such activity takes on entirely new proportions if one factors in the findings mentioned in this article, written by Meron Rapoport and published on the Haaretz website early this morning.

“More than one-third of West Bank settlements were built on private Palestinian land that was temporarily seized by military order for “security purposes,” according to a report by the Civil Administration that is being published here for the first time.”

“International law allows the seizure of occupied territory, but only for military needs. Instead, Israel built many of the settlements via such seizures, in defiance of a 1979 cabinet decision that forbade using private Palestinian land for settlements.”

“Until the late 1970s, most settlements were built on land seized by military order. In 1979, however, the High Court overturned a seizure order for the land on which Elon Moreh was slated to be built, saying it saw no “security necessity” for the settlement. Following that ruling, Menachem Begin’s government decided that all new settlements or expansions of existing ones would be built only on state land, and since then, military seizure orders officially have not been used for this purpose.

However, a Haaretz investigation found that at least 19 of the 44 settlements on the Civil Administration’s list were established after 1979, which means they violated this decision. Efrat, for instance, was established in 1983.”

What it comes down to is that over the years, the State of Israel has been systematically appropriating land from the Palestinians, claiming it as a military necessity, and then using the land to build settlements, in a move that directly and knowingly contradicted a ruling of the High Court. In other words, it would seem that, legally speaking, certain settlements (Ariel, Kiryat Arba and Efrat, to name but a few) are more illegal than others. (Note that this link to Efrat contains incorrect information about the year of its founding. Efrat was founded in 1983.)

Well, that’s certainly food for thought, isn’t it?

I imagine that to some, after a post like that, it might seem rather frivolous to post a music video and song lyrics. While U2‘s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was written about the situation in Northern Ireland, it conveys my feelings about the current situation in the Territories quite well.

Sunday Bloody SundayU2

I can’t believe the news today
I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long, how long?
‘Cos tonight
We can be as one, tonight.

Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street.
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall.